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8. INTERMEDIA PROCESSES 205

Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a professional basketball player for the Los
Angeles Lakers, announced that he was seropositive and that he was retir-
ing as an active player at a press conference on November 7, 1991. (The
story had leaked to certain media on November 6th.) Magic Johnson was
perhaps the most famous sports figure in America at the time of his
announcement and was the first African-American celebrity to disclose
6
seropositivity. The media gave massive coverage to this news event: The
New York Times, for example, devoted 300 column inches to the Magic John-
son story on November 8–10, 1991. As is the usual pattern for most news
issues (Dearing & Rogers, 1996), however, media attention then fell off,
with The New York Times devoting 140 column inches to Magic Johnson’s
disclosure the following week (November 11–17), 35 column inches in the
week of November 18–24, and no coverage the following week. This rise
and fall of a news issue occurs because newer issues push the earlier issue
out of its high priority on the media agenda (Dearing & Rogers, 1996).
The National AIDS Hotline was immediately deluged with telephone
calls following Magic Johnson’s November 7 disclosure (Fig. 8.1). During
the preceding 90 days, the National AIDS Hotline averaged 7,372 call
attempts, about half of which could be answered. On November 7, 1991,
when news of Johnson’s HIV infection was carried by the media, the
number of calls jumped by a factor of six times to 42,741. The following
day, November 8th, when Magic Johnson’s announcement was the major
news item in the United States (in terms of the amount of news coverage),
the number of call attempts to the National AIDS Hotline surged to
118,124, 19 times the average number of calls previously and a then-
7
record for the hotline. During the 60 days immediately following Magic
Johnson’s announcement, 1.7 million call attempts were made, an average
of 28,333 per day, or four times the average number of call attempts for the
preceding 90 days. 8 No other important HIV/AIDS-related events
6 Movie actor Rock Hudson and schoolboy Ryan White played a major role in putting the
issue of AIDS on the media agenda in the United States by disclosing their HIV/AIDS status.
For the 3 years prior to their disclosures in October 1985, there were an average of 14 news
stories about AIDS in six national media (like The New York Times and CBS News) per month.
During the 4 years after their disclosures, the average number of news stories per month
increased to 143 (Rogers, Dearing, & Chang, 1991).
7 The slowly decreasing effects over time of the Magic Johnson disclosure on the number of
call attempts to the National AIDS Hotline presumably is a function of the decreasing media
coverage of this news event (as in the case of The New York Times, cited previously).
8 As is evident in Fig. 8.1, this deluge of call attempts completely swamped the hotline’s
capacity to respond, with only about 3,000 of the 118,124 call attempts answered on Novem-
ber 8, 1991. A few months later, the National AIDS Hotline added staff, telephone lines, and
call-intercept capacities so as to better address the enormous volume of call attempts that
occurred due to celebrity disclosures and to other media events like Oprah Winfrey’s televi-
sion program on AIDS on April 8, 1992, in which she broadcast the telephone numbers for
the National AIDS Hotline.